The realm of freedom in new rural governance: Micro-politics of democracy in Sweden

Voluntary associations are at the heart of Swedish rural policy and strategies for governance as partners in bringing about ‘development from below.’ Examining the implications of this new responsibility being placed on the civil society in new modes of multilevel governance, I ask: do these changes presage greater political space for individuals vis à vis the state or is Swedish rural policy premised on ideas about an institutional context that might be disappearing? In comparative research in rural Sweden, I discuss state and civil-society relations at the macro level in light of the gendered micro-politics of associational life on the ground. Through ethnographic research with people involved in development work of different kinds, I examine how ideas about community associations are used to mobilize rural policy. I analyze its’ political implications and argue for the importance of analyzing macro in relation to the micropolitics on the ground for a better theoretical understanding of democracy and power in rural governance, in particular its gendered implications. I argue that past collaborative relations between the civil society and the state’s administrative apparatuses as well as the current focus of rural policy have enabled the state to hand over service functions to the civil society and diluted their ‘voice,’ incongrously endangering the institutional basis of rural policy itself. Further, attention to the gendered micropolitics of associational life makes apparent cleavages within civil society and its underlying relations of gender and power that challenge current conceptualizations on the neoliberalization of rural policy.     

Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of ‘resource struggles’ and ‘resource conflicts’ are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.     

Protecting tourism labor? Sustainable labels and private governance

This paper examines the application of private governance through certification labels and industry initiatives in the tourism industry. These efforts are sold as a way to achieve decent working conditions for tourism workers who participate in global value chains in the global South. The question at hand is, are these mechanisms an effective way to support tourism labor? Specifically, this research documents two main findings. First, I evaluate the programs through a tourism global value chain approach and demonstrate how tour operators use language about sustainability and the certification of accommodation suppliers for brand product differentiation and marketing. My findings demonstrate that these programs do not support tourism workers. Second, even with certification and recommendations, the standards are limited and do not include measures to protect against precarious employment, gendered divisions of labor, and emotional labor demands. Thus, these initiatives do not fully protect tourism workers. Finally, I argue a new governance research approach focused on workers’ rights and empowerment provides insights into achieving a more equitable international tourism landscape. This has implications for a governance analysis focused on rights and ‘synergistic’ governance strategies.     

Socio-economic determinants of women’s livelihood time use in rural Bangladesh

Achieving gender well-being and equality is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. A close examination of female livelihood time allocation can reveal gender inequality in livelihood choices between males and females. Using the feminist political ecology framework, this paper examines how gendered knowledge, roles, and responsibilities influence female livelihood time use in a patriarchal society like Bangladesh. We use a nationally representative household survey data to create Multiple Linear Regression Model to understand the association between economic, cultural, and environmental shocks with the total time allocation toward livelihood activities by women. Our results suggest that use of ‘Purdah’ by Muslim women acts as a negative detrimental factor towards their livelihood time allocation, thus affirming the complex role of culture and gendered economic activities. Women also allocate less time toward livelihood activities during pregnancy and/or breastfeeding. We find that female livelihood time use also depends on their ability to speak in public, their autonomy in livelihood decision processes, and their ownership in business enterprises. This research suggests creating more robust and gender sensitive policies in Bangladesh that can help achieve the United Nation’s goals of Sustainable Development.

     

Imaginative geographies of gender and HIV/AIDS: moving beyond neoliberalism

This paper examines how neoliberal development discourse contributes to the production and maintenance of problematic gendered hierarchies and spaces. By interrogating the basic assumptions undergirding this discourse, this paper explores how neoliberalism produces spaces which normalise certain identities—especially those associated with individualism and economic rationality, and makes errant values such as communalism and altruism. Drawing on perspectives from feminist geographies, we argue that by normalising and privileging certain masculine identities, neoliberalism reinscribes and legitimizes gendered power relations that are counterproductive to addressing HIV/AIDS. The ‘ideal’ person fighting HIV/AIDS in the neoliberal framework is rational, competitive and self-interested, but these characteristics are complicit in worsening HIV prevalence and mobilize problematic gender roles and identities. Given the pervasiveness of this ideology in Malawi, we propose ways in which families, communities and institutions can challenge and reshape gender identities and potential solutions to HIV within this context.     

Food porn,pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect: Exploring eating in cyberspace

By engaging with ‘pro-anorexia’ and ‘food porn’ on the Internet, this paper explores eating in cyberspace. Reflecting on the ways in which virtual, but affective, consumption is central to both food porn and pro-anorexia websites, the paper asks what the act of eating ‘triggers’ and produces, connects and displaces. It traces how eating in, and through, cyberspace shapes the biological materialities of bodies whilst also collapsing neat distinctions between offline and online worlds. Virtual vectors of spectating, salivating and digesting are disembodied and yet corporeal. Eating is seen to take place beyond and among bodies and to be dissipated both spatially and temporally. As such, cyberspace is outside and other to lived corporeality, and yet also folded into and productive of the intimate geographies and embodied subjectivities of everyday lives. As eating takes myriad forms across the de-materialised viscerality of the Internet, it also emerges as central to the production and ‘matter(ing)’ of cyberspace itself; this is (an) eating space in which what is eaten, by whom and with what bodies, perpetually shifts. Thus, seeking to contribute to geographical scholarship on affect and food, this paper engages with eating as both the subject of enquiry and also as a productive pathway into an interrogation of cyberspace and its place within the affective productions of the everyday. It suggests that this is a key site in which to explore the intimate socialities, materialities and biopolitics of food.     

Urban agriculture and political ecology of health in municipal Ashaiman,Ghana

This paper examines the multiple processes that shape the use of agrochemicals and wastewater irrigation in Ghanaian urban agriculture. It further explores whether and how these processes present bodily health challenges for women and men farmers. Qualitative fieldwork was conducted in Ashaiman, a municipal area located about 30 km north-east of Accra, Ghana’s capital. Methods of data collection involved in-depth interviews, focus groups and participatory risk ranking and scoring. Conceptually, the paper brings political ecologies of health into closer conversation with scholarship on embodiment and gender. Overall, the findings demonstrate how specific urban agricultural practices are socially produced, how these practices come to affect the human body, and the long-term gendered consequences. One of the contributions of the paper is to draw attention to the nature and cost of urban agriculture in Ghana, a cost not in financial or environmental sense, but in the realm of embodied experiences of exposure to agrochemicals. The paper argues that the current problem confronting urban agriculture in Ashaiman, Ghana, cannot be adequately addressed unless understood as socially produced and historically determined. Further, the health impact of urban agriculture is not only a full bodily experience, but is also gendered. In the end, a case is made as to why gendered bodies demand more critical analysis in scholarship involving political ecologies of health.     

Shopping to save lives: Gender and environment theories meet ethical consumption

Much of the current work in the field of ‘gender and environment’ has been developed around case studies of environmental roles, rights and responsibilities at the community or household scale in the South. This paper asserts that the theoretical insights developed through these case studies can be of great use when examining issues of gender and environment in the North, particularly when it comes to issues of ethical consumption. In this paper I examine the promotional discourses of two cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns (where consumption of a CRM product triggers a donation to a development cause) using two such insights: (i) the mutual constitution of gendered subjectivities and environments and (ii) a gender and environment approach to questioning neoliberalization. This approach highlights the ways in which – through consumption – gender is constituted transnationally at the same time that it is constituted in relation to environments. This approach also emphasizes a series of questions about the neoliberal aspects of CRM campaigns that are usually hidden behind discourses of motherhood and responsibility. Overall, I argue that bringing gender and environment and ethical consumption research together allows us to advance both areas of study in critical and insightful ways.     

‘Making space’ in Cairo: Expatriate movements and spatial practices

This paper examines what it means to be an ‘expatriate’ in Cairo through the lens of movement and space-making. Inquiring into a set of migrant (im)mobilities, spatial practices, relations, and imaginations, it argues that as a ‘spatialised’ identity category ‘expatriate’ narrates and enacts migratory privileges linked to wider hierarchies of social difference. It contributes to a growing literature examining the social and political dimensions of ‘expatriate’ migration and further engages scholarship thinking space and movement in relational and socio-historical terms. Rather than denoting an easily distinguishable group of migrants, ‘expatriate’ emerged as a contingent and ambiguous category of practice. As such, ‘expatriate’ stands in a productive relationship with privileged movement and socio-spatial processes. Like other migrants, respondents skillfully navigated the global differences in wealth, power and status they were presented with. Yet, unlike many other migrants, they did so from a privileged position within the global power-geometries of international migration. Migrants’ personal geographies were further shaped by how bodies were racialised and gendered in entangled, intersecting and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. This diversity and complexity of ‘expatriate’ geographies highlights the necessity of intersectional and situated analyses of privilege.     

Of silent maids,skilled gardeners and careful madams: gendered dynamics and strategies of migrant domestic workers in Accra,Ghana

Recent studies indicate that many migrants are engaged mainly in the informal sector in low-paid, short-term, and insecure occupations in cities. Using a qualitative research approach, this paper examines the gendered experiences, livelihood strategies and wellbeing of migrants engaged in domestic work in Accra, Ghana. Employing structure-agency theoretical perspectives, the paper also discusses how migrant domestic workers employ their own agency to counter exploitation. The findings show clear gendered patterns of employment in domestic work, with men having stronger agency to negotiate better conditions of work and remuneration. The paper argues that despite the heterogeneity and diversity of the work conditions and experiences of domestic workers in Accra, the importance of gender as a crucial factor mediating the experiences of both male and female domestic workers and their impacts on their wellbeing must be recognised in policies to address and regulate domestic work in Ghana.     

Embodied geographies of food,belonging and hope in multicultural Hamilton,Aotearoa New Zealand

This article focuses on embodied geographies of food, belonging and hope for a group of migrant women in the small city of Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. We explore the complex nature of multiculturalism as it is produced via place and food-sharing. Interviews and cooking sessions with 11 migrant women in Hamilton, each from a different country, prompted a range of emotions highlighting the numerous ways in which migrant women feel that they belong, or do not belong, to their ‘old home’, and their ‘new home’. Furthermore, the sharing of food and feelings helps establish affective ties between women migrants – across ethnic differences – and to the place of Hamilton. These hopeful intercultural encounters – discussed and digested in kitchens – are moments of reciprocity and mutual recognition between ethnically and culturally ‘different’ women. This account provides a means of not only highlighting the difficulties that migrant women face, but also the possibilities of multicultural place sharing.     

Exporting the Saemaul spirit: South Korea’s Knowledge Sharing Program and the ‘rendering technical’ of Korean development

This article provides a critical intervention into South Korea’s recent effort to promote its 1970s authoritarian-era rural modernization program, Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement), as the ‘iconic’ model of its international development assistance. To better understand how this movement has been represented, this article examines the policy narratives that have been produced by the Korean government’s Knowledge Sharing Program (KSP) and circulated through multiple development cooperation initiatives. These narratives portray Saemaul as the key to Korea’s developmental success: a mental revolution in values that inculcated the ‘can-do’ spirit in poor rural villagers and allowed them to escape poverty and stagnation. We argue that the emphasis of this narrative on the spiritual, voluntary, and value-oriented nature of the movement has been used to ‘render technical’ Korea’s development experience: i.e. to reduce it to a question of how development experts successfully cultivated the spirit of development in the Korean people and, by extension, how developing countries might do the same. We show how this narrative neglects the contested history and Cold War context of Saemaul, raising questions about the ‘brand’ of development assistance that has been built upon it.     

Gendered divisions in the new economy: Risks and opportunities

The concept 'new economy' is widely used to characterise the outcomes of contemporary restructuring processes – but in contrasting ways: by globalisation and the increasing use of communication and information technologies as well as by deregulation, polarisation, feminisation of employment and new, more flexible patterns and hours of work. These tendencies are interlinked and partly account for growing social and gender divisions. They pose problems for social sustainability but also develop differently in different economic and social formations. This paper develops a theoretical understanding of widening social divisions and their gendered form, indicates how these tendencies have developed to different degrees within the European Union and illustrates how the divisions are experienced by people in a local labour market in the neo liberal UK, where social and gender divisions are particularly wide. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Addressing the impacts of large-scale land investments: Re-engaging with livelihood research

What started as a media-driven hype about the global land rush has developed into a well-established academic debate on land governance and an important domain for policy intervention. Research over the past decade has deepened our understanding of how land, water and forests, which were once considered to be local assets and the sources of livelihoods, are transformed into global goods and the focus of capital investments. We are now clearly aware that such transformation generates significant impacts on the livelihood security of vulnerable groups. In response to this, a variety of policy interventions have been devised to minimize the negative impacts (‘do not harm’) and create new opportunities (‘do good’). Yet, it is still unclear how actual policy implementations play out on the ground, what the real impacts are at the local level and whether these interventions help people to improve their livelihoods. In this paper, we present an overview of the existing intervention approaches and their theoretical underpinnings, and discuss how to optimize the developmental outcomes. We argue that the once popular livelihood research framework should be revised and then incorporated more robustly in the existing intervention approaches, as it could help investors and governmental actors to engage in making their investments more relevant to local development.     

Tracing contingencies: analyzing the political in assemblages of web 2.0 cartographies

Our paper presents a theoretical approach to critical research on web 2.0 cartographies. Within the geoweb, dynamic and collaborative web based maps have become a popular medium for collating and communicating geographic information. Web 2.0 cartographies are often promoted as facilitating public participation and democratizing geographic knowledge. Such claims demand a closer look at the processes through which people do engage in these cartographic projects and the multiple actors, institutions, norms and technologies at work. In the context of ‘theorizing the geoweb’, here we propose conceptual tools for analyzing these myriad interactions within web 2.0 cartographies. We understand web 2.0 cartographies as assemblages of subjects, materialities and practices, or ‘actor networks’. Yet explorations of actor‐networks describe existing relations and as a consequence tend to overlook what has been excluded or lies outside of such assemblages. In order to overcome this blindness we suggest bringing together actor‐network theory with the concepts of hegemonic discourses, contingency and the political from Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. These two political theorists stress the idea that specific social realities become fixed, sedimented and perceived as natural while other possible social realities become marginalized. Using the example of the dynamic ‘Palestine Crisis Map’ (an Ushahidi Crowdmap) we demonstrate a methodology that emphasizes sensitivity towards moments of exclusion and struggle, where the political unfolds. Theorizing the political in this way extends the processual approach within Critical Cartography and offers a conceptual basis for critical research on the social dimensions of web 2.0 cartographies and geoweb practices.     

Better than text? Critical reflections on the practices of visceral methodologies in human geography

This co-authored intervention discusses themes on the thinking and doing of visceral research. 'Visceral' is taken here as that relating to, and emerging from, bodily, emotional and affective interactions with the material and discursive environment. There has recently been a distinct and necessary turn within the social sciences, particularly in human geography, towards the need for more viscerally-aware research practices. Building on such work, this collective intervention by leading visceral scholars offers two key contributions: first, it critically examines visceral geography approaches by considering their methodological contributions, and suggests improvements and future research pathways; and second, the authors extend recent visceral geography debates by examining how to conduct this type of research, providing reflections from their own experiences on the practicalities and challenges of implementing visceral methods. These observations are taken from a diverse range of research contexts - for example, from gender violence and community spaces, to the politics of 'good eating' in schools and social movements (e.g. Slow Food) - and involve a similarly diverse set of methods, including body-map storytelling, cooking and sharing meals, and using music to 'attune' researchers' bodies to nonhuman objects. In short, this collective intervention makes important and original contributions to the recent visceral turn in human geography, and offers critical insights for researchers across disciplines who are interested in conceptually and/or practically engaging with visceral methods.     

Strategic globalizing centers and sub-network geometries: A social network analysis of multi-scalar energy networks

Over the past three decades, a multitude of studies have examined the relational properties of corporate networks as a proxy for analyzing interurban hierarchies and structures. While this has been important in illuminating the nature of global connectivity, a significant conceptual lacuna exists in understanding how a multi-scalar analysis of interurban networks informs a more complete understanding of the geographies of globalization, and how cities within these networks act as regional globalizing centers. Building upon the theoretical and methodological foundations of ‘world city network’ (WCN) research, this paper investigates the corporate networks of the energy industry as a historic driver of globalization using social network analysis from an Australia geographical perspective. Globally and nationally scaled energy networks derived from the Platts and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) corporate lists are used to explore the convergence of nationally and globally articulated networks, and identify cities instrumental in the globalization of the national industry sub-networks. These are strategic ‘globalizing centers’ which, in contradistinction to ‘global cities’ or ‘world cities’ as broad classifications, play nuanced roles in anointing industry-specific circuits of capital and information. The analysis of two complementary yet distinct networks provides theoretical insight into how scale plays an integral role in defining/articulating interurban relations.     

Sibling caringscapes: Time–space practices of caring within youth-headed households in Tanzania and Uganda

This paper investigates the time–space practices of young people caring for their siblings in youth-headed households affected by AIDS in Tanzania and Uganda. Based on qualitative exploratory research with young people heading households, their siblings, NGO workers and community members, the article develops the notion of sibling ‘caringscapes’ to analyse young people’s everyday practices and caring pathways through time and space. Participatory time-use data reveals that older siblings of both genders regularly undertake substantial caring tasks at the very high end of the caregiving continuum. Drawing on rhythmanalysis, the paper explores how young people negotiate emotional geographies and temporalities of caring. The competing rhythms of bodies, schooling, work and seasonal agricultural production can result in ‘arrhythmia’ and time scarcity, which has detrimental effects on young people’s health, education, future employment prospects and mobility. Young people’s lifecourse transitions are shaped to a large extent by their caring responsibilities, resulting in some young people remaining in a liminal position for considerable periods, unable to make ‘successful’ transitions to adulthood. Despite structural constraints, however, young people are able to exercise some autonomy over their caring pathways and lifecourse transitions. The research sheds light on the ways that individuals embody the practices, routines and rhythms of everyday life and exercise agency within highly restricted broader landscapes of care.     

Possible selves in a precarious labour market: Youth,imagined futures,and transitions to work in the UK

In this paper we suggest that a construct known as “possible selves”, which has been developed in psychological literature, holds conceptual merits that are of use to a growing body of literature on youth transitions, and within it, an increasing interest in imagined futures. We highlight several benefits of possible selves that have emerged from our empirical research with young men in two English towns, Luton and Swindon. Research and theorization about youth futures has suggested that young people’s values and their perceived positions in society can be elicited and seen in their projections of themselves in the future. We conclude that possible selves provides a useful addition to this literature by offering a theorization of the link between imagined possibilities in the future and motivation to act in the present. We suggest that this construct opens the scope of empirical and theoretical enquiry into youth transitions and trajectories toward future possibilities.